We see a lot of Raspberry Pis being used as security cameras – check out this fine example that we blogged back in 2013 – they’re a cheap and effective solution for people who want to deter burglars and vandals.

This very serious-looking fake camera housing is only £5.49 on Amazon – click the image to buy, and then stick a camera board inside.

The good folks at Adafruit had one of those ideas that makes you slap yourself in the forehead for not coming up with it yourself. They’ve made a camera system which can upload images to the cloud, so you can check on it from wherever you are – but it also uploads other sensor data of your choosing (in this example, temperature) and graphs it using matplotlib. A sort of proto-Nest, if you will.

We’re using Adafruit’s adafruit.io here: it’s their new Internet of Things API. It’s still in Beta, but pretty solid; we’d be interested to hear how you get on with it.

This project uses two Raspberry PIs – a sender and a receiver. The sender has a Raspberry Pi Camera and an MCP9808 temperature sensor to publish data to adafruit.io. The receiver, a dashboard somewhere else in the world, subscribes to this data feed and displays it.

This dashboard Raspberry Pi has a PiTFT and displays the image whenever it’s sent to the feed (every 5 minutes), the current temperature is overlaid on the image using pygame. The final cherry on the cake here is that if you tap the screen you flip to the graph view. This takes the data from the feed using the io-client-python data method, pulls out the last 24 hours and uses matplotlib to draw a graph of temp/time. Of course, you can see the feeds in the adafruit.io online dashboard too!

There’s a lot you can do in terms of feature-creep here; we’re thinking about what other sensors you could usefully add, and what else you might be able to do with a big dataset of images. Go wild – and tell us if you make one yourselves!

Snap, I’m doing something very similar with my bird box camera. Currently streaming live video of (empty) bird box, with time stamp and temperature overlaid. The temperature charts are also available on my website. I’m using thingspeak.com. It’s fully documented with picamera docs coming very soon.

I’ve been developing a Raspberry Pi powered sensor/controller for my electric garage heater. I pay realtime electricity rates here in the Chicago area so it behooves me to turn off the heater when electricity prices spike, which it does during high demand periods. I’m scraping realtime (5 minute intervals) electricity prices off the internet and forcing the heater to turn off if above a set limit. It also controls the heater depending on a temperature set-point. Just for fun, in a separate Python process I’m logging the temperature and humidity inside the garage and streaming to Plotly. Here’s an old plot. https://plot.ly/~wardhand/2/raspberry-pi-temperature-humidity-in-garage/

I’m not live right now because I’m working on a mp3 player/server project and haven’t bought another Pi yet. I’m seeing one or two more Pi 3’s in my future.

I would be really curious if you got this working or not and how you coded it? Have you posted it somewhere? I wrote some code to do something similar, but I currently send an email when the value exceeds a set amount. Long term I would like to add control though for various things around the house though.

I would like to see a counter display added to the home page of your web site, where the counter shows the number of raspberry pis manufactured and shipped … It should be updated as frequently as possible but at least weekly…